Rapidly Growing Your Sales Org? Don’t Manage Teams —?Manage 'Workstreams'

Scale the Sale – A series on building a world-class enterprise tech sales organization, from the ground up.

When you’re scaling up your sales team, you’ll likely need to make adjustments—including how the team is managed. But you must learn to adapt quickly. As with all things in sales, time is of the essence. Spending time on hiring and training new managers can kill your momentum.

There’s an alternative that doesn’t require you to hire experienced managers or take weeks, months or longer for training, and lets your sales org adjust for rapid growth without losing pace: workstream management.

Workstream management is an approach that manages processes, not people. Instead of handling the organization of an entire team, understanding everyone’s workloads, and holding all members accountable for every task, a workstream manager is focused on the execution of a single or a few tasks and/or processes.

Read on to see how workstream management is different from traditional management, and how it benefits rapidly growing sales teams.

What’s the Hold-up?

As a sales organization grows, it becomes difficult for one or two people to manage everyone effectively. The common solution is to add more managers and assistant managers, forming sub-teams and an organizational hierarchy. This management structure is standard because it works well for most organizations under normal conditions.

However, if a sales team is scaling up at an accelerated rate, the sudden formation of a hierarchical management structure leads to unnecessary complexities and inhibits growth.

That’s because it takes time to hire and train up new managers—time that a rapidly expanding organization doesn’t have. Asking managers to manage effectively with little experience managing people, processes, or enablement is unfair to them, and unfair to the team.

Workstream management avoids this time-consuming adjustment period while still solving the immediate needs of enablement and accountability.

The Benefits of Workstream Management

A skilled manager must oversee every aspect of their team, from the execution of day-to-day tasks, to equipping all staff with tools and training, and even handling team members’ personal concerns. In contrast, a workstream manager is only responsible for the execution, enablement and accountability for a process.

Here’s why this management approach works so well:

• Nobody’s great at everything: Instead of being a jack of all trades, a workstream manager is a master of one. This lets team members transition to management quickly, making use of their strengths right from the start, instead of taking months—or years—to train.
• Limited “people management”: The most experienced manager, free from the responsibilities of managing daily workstreams, can focus on managing people—arguably one of the most important managerial skills that takes a long time to cultivate.
• Reduced burden through shared responsibility: Team members become subject-matter experts and eventually take on responsibility for workstreams. This sharing responsibilities takes the burden off other managers and adds value to the team.
• Accountability, consistency, uniformity: Workstream managers have specific duties, and it’s clear who does what. That makes it easy to measure performance and hold managers accountable for their metrics. It also makes it easy to establish processes, coaching, and enablement for workstreams that will be rolled out consistently across the whole team.

The Takeaway

When you’re scaling your sales team quickly, you need to alter your management approach to accommodate for growth. Hiring or training new managers is the traditional route, but it’s got a lot of speed-bumps that will slow down your progress.

Instead, consider ditching or delaying traditional management structures in favor of workstream management. That way, by sharing management responsibilities across the whole team, you can still ramp up your efforts and scale up your org without skipping a beat.

Jake Rothstein is the Director of Global Sales Development at MotionPoint, a U.S.-based technology firm that helps large enterprises launch, operate and optimize their multilingual websites to serve their global customers.